A site where a man with far too much interest in beer gets to write about it.

Monday, 17 July 2017

Malting, thatching and religious fundamentalism

Something on the news seemed strangely familiar the other day, so I did a bit of googling and sure enough I'd spoken to one of the people mentioned. In my last job I was involved in malting as well as brewing, and I'd had a fascinating conversation with John Letts. He's a thatcher, and a baker, who has revived ancient cereal varieties and he was interested in getting them malted. When buildings are re-thatched they put the new thatch on top of the
old, so old buildings have a history of grain varieties contained in
their roof. There are talks he's given about this on youtube.

Commercial maltsters won't normally go below ten tonnes, so he was looking for someone who could malt on a smaller scale, and even malt mixed grains. The pilot plant where I worked would only do 100kg at a time, so was too small for anything but research. I would have been interesting research though. Grants are available, and he said he'd look into it, but I never heard back from him. Now I have at least heard of him again.

It turns out his son has put the mentalism into funamentalism by converting to islam and running off to join ISIS. He's now in prison so the restrictions he's imposed on himself with his deluded beliefs have ended up with him being extremely physically restricted too. There's probably a moral there or something. I don't have much sympathy for the son. But I can't image how awful it must be for the father. I hope he gets to see happier times.